A Child's Garden of Verses [Hardcover]

First published in 1885, Stevenson's verses so truly reflect the feelings of young children--about being small, the bliss of going up in a swing so high, discovering one's shadow, happiness and sorrow and dreaming--that they have never ceased to be an essential part of a child's library. Robinson's beautiful pictures originally appeared in 1896 in the first illustrated edition.Throughout his life,Robert Louis Balfour Stevensonwas tormented by poor health. Yet despite frequent physical collapses—mainly due to constant respiratory illness—he was an indefatigable writer of novels, poems, essays, letters, travel books, and children’s books. He was born on November 13, 1850, in Edinburgh, of a prosperous family of lighthouse engineers. Though he was expected to enter the family profession, he studied instead for the Scottish bar. By the time he was called to the bar, however, he had already begun writing seriously, and he never actually practiced law. In 1880, against his family’s wishes, he married an American divorcée, Fanny Vandegrift Osbourne, who was ten years his senior; but the family was soon reconciled to the match, and the marriage proved a happy one.All his life Stevenson traveled–often in a desperate quest for health. He and Fanny, having married in California and spent their honeymoon by an abandoned silver mine, traveled back to Scotland, then to Switzerland, to the South of France, to the American Adirondacks, and finally to the south of France, to the South Seas. As a novelist he was intrigued with the genius of place:Treasure Island(1883) began as a map to amuse a boy. Indeed, all his works reveal a profound sense of landscape and atmosphere:Kidnapped(1886);The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde(1886);The Master of Ballantrae(1889).In 1889 Stevenson’s deteriorating health exiled him to the tropics, and he settled in Samoa, where he was given patriarchal status by the nativesl3ï